Braden Pollock, Legal Brand Marketing – Premium Domains & Why All Attorneys Should Invest in Pay-Per-Lead
Braden Pollock is a well-known domain investor with a portfolio in the thousands, including sciencefiction.com, trafficaccidents.com, divorce.attorney, and many more.
In addition to being a serial entrepreneur, Braden is an angel investor and holds an equity interest in several dozen companies.
Among these companies is Legal Brand Marketing, a company that provides lead generation services to lawyers nationwide.
What’s in This Episode:
- Who is Braden Pollock?
- How Braden got into investing in premium domains.
- What premium domains can do for your brand and SEO.
- How Braden’s Legal Brand Marketing helps attorneys generate leads and grow their business.
- What differentiates Legal Brand Marketing from other lead generation companies
- Braden talks about the value of a lead
- Why you need to invest in pay-per-lead
Episode 19:
Prologue
Welcome to The Rankings Podcast, where we feature top founders, entrepreneurs and elite personal injury attorneys and share their inspiring stories. Now let’s get started with the show.
Chris Dreyer
Chris Dreyer here President and Founder of Rankings.io where we help elite personal injury attorneys dominate first page rankings. You’re listening to the Rankings Podcast where I feature elite personal injury attorneys and innovative business owners. Speaking of innovative business centers, I have Braden Pollock on the show today. Braden is a well known domain investor with a portfolio in the thousands including sciencefiction.com, trafficaccidents.com, divorce.attorney and many many more. In addition to being a serial entrepreneur, he is an angel investor and holds an equity interest in several dozen companies. Among these companies is Legal Brand Marketing, which provides lead generation services Lawyers nationwide. Braden, welcome to the show.
Braden Pollock
Thank you. Good to be here. I just want to point out that you talked about how you represent elite attorneys. And then what about the entrepreneurs? I mean, you were specifically innovative from innovate. Okay. Not elite. Alright, just just wanted it all
Chris Dreyer
considered elite, Elite Business Centers. Hey, let’s kick things off, you know, with with a loaded question here, given your wide entrepreneurial pedigree, how did you first become an entrepreneur? How do you get started?
Braden Pollock
He’s his pedigree. I don’t think anybody’s ever used pedigree reference to me. Maybe my dogs. How did I become an entrepreneur? I guess because I couldn’t really work for anybody else. I didn’t. I didn’t have a choice. You know, I always had that fire in my belly ever since I was a little kid. I just never pictured my myself working for other people. I remember when I was in high school, I was in play production, you know, we put on those on the place school and, and people would write in the programs about how they were going to become famous actors. And I would write that I’m going to graduate, go to college and then start a business. I always, I always saw myself owning my own business. And I always wanted to have multiple businesses. I’m not sure if that was a good idea or not. But here I am.
Chris Dreyer
Well, you know, one of one of the, one of the focuses that I really want to key in on is is your legal expertise, and particularly the premium domain name side. So how did you get started investing in these premium domain names? How did you notice the trend and like this opportunity to acquire these domains?
Braden Pollock
Yeah, good question that actually came from the marketing company. So when we started Legal Brand Marketing it was specifically DUI leads, which I will probably come back to. So let’s put a pin in that. So we were representing DUI lawyers only, and they would come to us for everything. And this is we’re going back 16 years, right? So, so I was there, internet guy. I mean, literally, lawyers would call me up and ask me like, why they weren’t getting their email, right, which of course had nothing to do with me, but it was computer related. And back then people just didn’t understand the internet. And so so we started building websites just just because of demand. And so we would take an order to build a website and we would acquire domain for them. This is him registering domain names. I wasn’t even charging because it was $7 at the time, and I’m charging him whatever was $4,000 for website or $10,000 website. So I Throw it in. And I came across. I came across somebody, I don’t know, he emailed me or emailed him, and he had some really good legal domain names. And he wanted like a few hundred bucks apiece. And so I just reached out to my clients and I said, Hey, you know, do you want these? And they’d say, and most of them said, Yes. And they’re like, well, if you think it’s a good idea, then sure. And I just resold them for exactly what the guy was asking for 300 bucks or 400 bucks. But the guy said, if you take them all, you know, I’ll sell you the whole thing for $5,000 Okay. And I collected most of that money from the names I resold based on this guy’s pricing because I wasn’t upselling and then ended up with this small portfolio with extra names and kind of discovered this aftermarket that didn’t know existed. And, and then after a year or two, I had a couple of hundred Extra domains that I had registered a few years ago, my client, hey, which ones do you want and he would take three out of the five, or canceled orders or whatever it was, I ended up a couple hundred extra. And I talked to a friend of mine. That was the sales manager for.tv tell me if this story is getting too long into now this is perfect. Okay. So I called him up and I said, you know, you understand this domain stuff. So, I have a couple hundred domains. Is there any way I can monetize them? They’re just sitting there. They’re all paid up for you know, the remaining of the remainder of the year. And he said, Park them. I’m like, What the hell is parking? And to explain to me, you know, you’re pointing towards the there’s these parking companies. You pointed your DNS towards these guys servers, they populate the domain. With a landing page. There’s many types in the domain name a landing page, dynamically packed With ads, and then you get a cut of the of the ad revenue, which was mostly Google features. And I was like, great. So I did that for a few months and had this suddenly had extra revenue. And then would dawned on me one day, we literally I was sitting at my desk and I was kind of looking at these domains. I was thinking about it. And it struck me that people that were typing in whatever the domain was, you know, duivirginia.com. I realized Those are my clients, and I’m now sending to somebody else for 12 cents. And some sometimes I was actually there my ads, and so I would be charged $8 for click, and then that click was was actually coming back to me through my network. And I was been getting my rev share which was like 14 cents. And so when this When this struck me, I then redirected all of those domains to appropriate pages on my websites. And then, so now I kind of understand domains and there’s this aftermarket and parking. And then there was a conference that was in LA, which is where I live 100 years ago. And so I went to this conference and discovered there’s this entire world of domain investors out there, and premium names, and there was an auction and names are selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars, millions of dollars. I sat in an auction for sex.com. And it went up to $9.3 million. And the guy said no, and walked away, because it didn’t hit the reserve. I couldn’t believe it. It ended up selling a month later for 12 and a half million. Wow. And so I was just fascinated by this world. I continue to buy legal domains and then resell them and I’ve sold thousands of leads. means over the years. And as I was going to the conferences that I started speaking at the conferences, and it kind of became a fixture now I am the kind of the industry moderator. So I travel all over the world to the main conferences and moderate them and learned about premium names. So not just legal names, but premium names being one word, dictionary word.com names, right? And income being in the industry and going to the auctions. I learned about those and then kind of shifted my focus from the legal names to these higher value one word.com names. I did that some years ago. So here I am as a it’s kind of a side hustle, but it makes a fair amount of money. So you asked Yeah, domain names and I gave you the longest
Chris Dreyer
possible. Well, that’s that’s a great story. It’s kind of interesting. Because I see a lot of these companies, but it’s like, how did they get started? How did they develop their portfolio? And, you know, just pointing just I just want to point out to our audience, we’re talking about the cream of the crop types of domains just in the legal specific, you’ve got expungements.com, divorce.attorney, some just really premium domain names. And then on the other side, things like pessimists.com, you’ve got, you know, just all kinds of these disbelief. That’s the one that’s Well, uh, you know, so let’s jump in to the practical use of these in the branding use of these. So how do they influence branding? How do they, you know, not only from the branding side, but also from do they affect Seo? I know Google said that they cracked down on you know, the benefit of domain names, but did they really crack down from an SEO standpoint? You know, what? The use of these How do you see these being used by your your buyers. So there are
Braden Pollock
in domain investing, it’s like really any other kind of investment. Alternative asset class. So there are categories. So so for example, I don’t know, there’s people who invest in livestock. I don’t know the first thing about livestock, but I’m sure there are things to know you don’t just go in and buy a bunch of cows, right? There’s different kinds of cows and different ages and different values. And I have no idea right? domains are the same way. If we talk about let’s say premium coms, there are names that what we call em DS are exact match domains. So in your world, AccidentAttorney.com, right, like that’s a premium legal name, right? I have a number of names like that. So that’s an exact match that relates exactly to the industry, but there are brandable names. There’s a couple kinds of brandable names. There are names that you Nothing, right made up words. And then their names like pineapple.com, which is pineapple.com will never be used to sell pineapples. This Maverick doodle reached out to me years ago, and they offered like $35,000 or something which is preposterous and, you know,
Chris Dreyer
right, far less than I think, right I think I bought my domain for something like that like 30,000 rankings.io and that’s not even near the level right?
Braden Pollock
Now so so you know pineapple.com is a seven figure name and I’ve turned down multiple six figure offers I made I think the highest probably like 200 grand or something. But it’s, it’s for sure a seven figure name. And there are there are seven figure domain sales weekly. There are eight figure domain sales all the time and I would say at least once or twice a month. They’re just not public, because who can afford to buy a eight figure domain name, right, a company that does something else. Right? And so this is they just bury it in their marketing expense is not what they do. So they’re just not public with it. And they’re almost all under NDA. I don’t sell names under NDA. I, you know, I always get that clause in the contract and I strike it and I send it back and the lawyer comes back and wait, you struck the confidentiality clause. I’m like, because it’s I’m not going to be under an NDA. I will not divulge who the buyer is, because that’s not meaningful, but I want the cops out there. Because I’m part of this industry. And that’s, that’s meaningful to me. And we always know who the buyer is because they start using this domain name anyway. Every once in a while they don’t I sold q.org to a guy. And if you if you print it was half a million dollars and just the letter Q And you know, I, I had never divulged to the buyer was and you can see if some crypto related thing if you go to the site, but I wasn’t willing to not divulge the price. Okay. Right, right. But that’s just me and I, and I want to get back to this industry that I’ve been in a long time and I’m very active. But most big sales are under NDA, so we never hear about them. Voice comm sold last summer for $30 million. And it was bought from a public company. So it was it was released. But you know, they didn’t want to sell it. So the buyer just kept going up and up and up until they had to. I mean, it was, it was that $30 million was more than their entire year’s revenue. So they had to say yes.
Chris Dreyer
So so let’s so you’ve got the branding component. You know, it’s easy to say one word, it’s stronger. It’s it’s it brings a precedence and clout just to some of these, you know some of these domain names. Right? memorable? Yeah, it’s
Braden Pollock
when you need it, you need need a word that is that is not necessarily descriptive, right? But it needs to be something that is going to be remembered. I sold packet.com for 350. I guess about a year ago, two big company raised a bunch of money and they were operating on a on packet dotnet. And you can’t, you can’t be dotnet can be consumer facing because people are going to screw that up. They’re going to they’re going to go to the.com and type out the email address. They’re going to default in their head to.com and so there’s going to be what we call an email leakage. It’s like a toll free number. What’s the first thing that comes to your mind? 800 Yeah, but 88887 7665 five like these all exist, but that’s not our brains. defaults to
Chris Dreyer
that’s interesting. When you’re telling me this I instantly think of a recent interview with Brian Chase doesn’t chase their domain names best attorney.com. I don’t remember every attorney that comes on and their domain name but there’s this very memorable. Those two words superlatives, it’s, it’s a really good strategy you know, kind of shifting over to this kind of transitions to your to your lead generation company to Legal Brand Marketing. How does this all work together? How does Legal Brand Marketing help attorneys with lead generation and growing their firms?
Braden Pollock
Do you want to talk about the terrible domain name are you doing? We do.
Chris Dreyer
Let’s talk about how you you know most of our audience is personal injury attorney so so and I saw that you have you know, a motor vehicle accident, you know, segment where you sell MBA leads, and then you have
Braden Pollock
MBAs actually our largest category.
Chris Dreyer
Yeah, let’s let’s talk about NBA. Let’s, let’s say hypothetically, I’m St. Louis Personal Injury Attorney and I’m looking to grow my PI firm. How does your organization help? You know me grow?
Braden Pollock
Well, so what we do is we sell we sell our leads based on on practice area and geo. Right. So it can be zip code county state, right. And we have a lot of attorneys that buy more than one practice area because not everyone focuses. But so you said, well,
Chris Dreyer
let’s just say St. Louis
Braden Pollock
Yeah. So so you would buy St. Louis as Gio and an MBA is the practice area. We also have your personal injury and other related categories but but we break it down and then we so just qualified vetted leads. And if it’s a bunk lead, you know, dispute it. We will we’ll do what’s called a post qual right post qualification. Make sure that you is a bad lead, because sometimes it’s not. Sometimes it is a good lead. So we call it we if we get the client on the phone, then we just taught transfer it back to the attorney, and don’t accept the dispute. But look in in. I think there’s a lot of lead gen companies that aren’t trusted, because they are buying their leads from God knows what sources, they don’t vet those, they just run through their system. And then the lawyers calling these leads that are just bunk leads, right? And then they dispute it, then they get upset because they’re wasting their time. And so we vet all of our sources, because we deal with lots and lots of publishers. After all these years, I mean, I don’t think there’s anybody we don’t work with. And we accept, we expect except the disputes if they’re not good and who We have I mean, if if someone googled us now I don’t think you would find anything negative from anybody that’s ever been a client. Because, you know, we stand behind what we do.
Chris Dreyer
Yeah, so so let me jump in here and I don’t want to throw anybody under the bus. But let’s so there’s some well known lead generation companies, you know, there’s 4 Legal Leads, there’s Thumbtack, there’s Nolow you know, FineLaw used to sell leads, how is the main differentiator where you vet these leads and you kind of you’ve kind of scrubbed the bad ones is that the main differentiator
Braden Pollock
Yeah, well, was more than that. So there are if we have a publisher that so a lot of sources, we have our own websites for generating leads right and then and then we buy from you name it. If we are buying from somebody that does not produce good leads, then we just stop buying from them. Right, so we, so we sign up with a new publisher, everything stays in house initially, we pre qual them, we pre qualify those leads before we send them out. Because otherwise we’re we’re kind of blindly sending these unproven leads to our clients. And we’re not going to do that because it’s our reputation. So we make sure that the leads are good quality, before we kind of open up and and let these leads through our network to our clients. And so once that’s proven, then that we put them in our system, they do route to clients. But we get instant feedback, right, because a client doesn’t want to pay for a bad lead. So if we see bad leads starting to come from a particular source, then we’ll take that whole source back in house and pre qual them before we send them to our clients. It costs That’s more money, obviously. But he’s our reputation.
Chris Dreyer
Right. Right. So yeah, that’s, that’s more time for you to go back and vet him instead of the direct direct source. And, you know, are there does your company offer, you know, territory exclusivity? VMA? You know, is there are because I know some of those companies I’ve mentioned earlier, I’m not again, I’m not going to throw any one of those under the bus. But some of those those source, you know, 510 attorneys, the same lead and it’s just like, okay, whoever gets it first gets it. You know, how does that part of your business work? Yeah.
Braden Pollock
And that company doesn’t exist anymore. Right. So that that company,
they they sold themselves that they’re part the part of Nolo right, which, right, right. It’s, I mean, most companies, I mean, they they tried to buy our company at the time. So so that that company that would sell a lead 10 to 12 times you, obviously you can’t do that, right because if if it’s a conflict of interest, well Look, this particular company that will remain unnamed, you know, they would sell it for $80. They would sell it for $2. Right? Because they would retail it and they would sell it for $2 as if it was a backstop lead. And they would just take anything. Right. And so which is not sustainable, because the the people the leaves themselves the people that are looking for a lawyer, they’re pissed, right? When when the phone rings the fourth time, the fifth time, the sixth time. They’re mad, right? And so now if you are the eighth lawyer to call this person, they are not happy. And then that lawyer gets near full. That lawyer then calls us saying what the hell you sold this lead a times like No, we didn’t we sold it once. Right? And that’s true, but we bought it from somebody that sold it as many times as they possibly could. So you know, those leads With those relationships, we killed those relationships long, long time ago. And there wasn’t sustainable even that company doesn’t even exist anymore. Got it? Just Bad, bad practices. So what we do is, if we are buying from a third party, we are buying it exclusively. And that’s like that it has to be the case. Because we need to be able to control what’s happening with this leaf. It can’t be like, well, they sold it a few times, like know, for sure. We’re buying exclusively now. With us, you can buy from us exclusively. Or not exclusively. If it’s not exclusively, that means we will sell it up to three times. Okay, so possibly to other buyers, but you know, this going into it. So that means you’re paying us, whatever the number is you’re paying a $65 instead of $95, right? You’re paying less, but you’re sharing it and so Now it’s kind of a race to the finish. But But everybody knows us going into it, right? You can pay more you want it if you have and look and what we will tell lawyers. When they ask, Well, what should we do? Okay, well, who’s taking these calls? Do you have a call center? Do you have salespeople at the ready, like that immediately respond to emails immediately call back or they’re to answer the phones, you are going to close more leads, you can be competitive, you can share that lead, you don’t have to buy it exclusively, you don’t want to because you’re going to you’re going to beat them to the punch right?
Chris Dreyer
Yet not only that, not only that, so, a PE firm and the same market may have different criteria for the level cases they take further soft tissue to major injury. So you know, that could be a factor too. And the amount they’re willing to spend on a lead, you know, with with those criteria, it may be much higher than, you know, the soft tissue. And that was kind of my my next question was on pricing, you know, it all comes down to ROI and return on your investment, whether you’re doing PPC, SEO, whatever, you know, what other form of marketing in terms of direct response or directly, Jen? So, you know, the value of a lead in St. Louis and always had this debate with a lot of individuals, a lot of people in our industry, the value of a lead in St. Louis for car accident is different than the value and say, Los Angeles. Right? Yeah, much larger market more competition. So is your is your pricing model? Do you differ bird by geography? Or is it just the fixed costs on your MBAs and that’s what the cost is.
Braden Pollock
You know, I believe MBA is one cost across the board. I’m not I’m not certain it. Look, I don’t I don’t run the day to day anymore that said this company 16 years old, and and I do a number of other things. So I think although somebody from my team is going to watch this video and go No, no, no, that’s not. I’m not sure is the answer. Okay. Okay. But, you know, in in other practice areas, it is geo specific. I just don’t know about about NBA.
Chris Dreyer
Gotcha, gotcha. So, you know, being in business 16 years, obviously you vetted, you know, the best sources and, and kind of, you know, my, my final question on this is, is, you know, how are you positioning this company for growth? Is it more about acquiring new sources for the leads and setting up those relationships? Is that the, is that the main component? I know you don’t do the day to day but but overall vision, I’m sure you’re highly involved in that.
Braden Pollock
Yeah. Yeah. So So, a couple a couple ways. So we are at the moment, we are transitioning. I shouldn’t say transitioning because we’re not moving away from what we’re doing now. But we’re layering on a wholesale component where we are are buying in much larger volumes. So we’re buying it wholesale and selling it wholesale. Right? And then I mean, you kind of have to understand this industry. Everybody works together, right? Nobody’s an island in this space. We’re all pinging each other. And it doesn’t matter who generates this lead, it bounces around to everybody until somebody can place it. Right. So there are, there are practice areas that have super high volume. And there are wholesale sellers and their wholesale buyers. And we do both. And so we’re focused on some of those larger volumes. But we also have a retail sales team. And a lot of Legion companies don’t, they don’t retail. They don’t have a sales team. They don’t have customer service. They don’t have they’re not charging credit cards every month, right. It’s a different model. Frankly, if I was to start over, I might take that model, right, because I’ve got this big team of salespeople that are calling lawyers every day. Right? I’ve got customer service people and account managers and, and and an accounting department. And you know, I’ve got all of this overhead, that that other companies don’t have it all right, because they just generate the lead, and then wholesale often that’s it. Right. So we’re focused on building out this wholesale division. And the advantages we can also pull from that. And retail. Right now we have all this volume going through, and the salespeople can look at that wholesale volume and pull some of those practice and practice NGOs out of that to retailer. Nice, which increases our margin. But the wholesale margin is totally different. Right? So it might be 5% or 10%, but in volume,
Chris Dreyer
got it? Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, I love that.
Braden Pollock
So then layer layering on more practices. So when we started, we were do it For years just DUI, and and frankly 16 years ago, there was no one generate DUI leads at all. I was I was the first company generate DUI leads and and we crushed the market. We built a giant website was a 40,000 page website when we launched, and we just we just crushed everybody. And so no matter where you were in the country, you had to come to us if you wanted to compete because even if you were number one, we launched our website and suddenly you were number two. Now, SEO a little bit different nowadays. It’s not quite so easy, but we did very well at the very beginning and and then I bought some some other DIY sites kind of popped up after mine and I acquired them. And so I just wrapped up that whole industry. And then over the years, it’s evolved into other practices that we’ve launched one at a time because it’s it’s like going into a hole Other industry, right? Just because they’re lawyers doesn’t mean like a bankruptcy lawyer doesn’t know a DUI lawyer is no accident. Right? Right. And so one one practice every time we roll out and that’s either we’re doing it you know, the salespeople are out there making the calls. Or I’m, I acquire a competitor, somebody that’s that’s in that space. So so for example, we got into traffic tickets A while ago, and there was the the biggest traffic traffic ticket provider was called ticket void. And we acquired it. So it was it was a it was easy to fold in. made sense to start selling traffic ticket leads and and that client base it was easy to upsell them with, with personal injury and criminal and auto accident and DUIs because most of those traffic ticket buyers weren’t sold a traffic ticket. And then the traffic ticket inventory that hadn’t been sold, we were able to upsell our, our client base that we’re doing DUIs and auto accidents, etc. So it was a pretty good fit. And I’ve acquired a few companies that way, folded them in. Nice.
Chris Dreyer
Nice. Yeah, I like the acquisition strategy. And in fact, it’s it’s just an interesting strategy. And I’ve even looked at acquiring individual landing pages into permanent 301 redirect after they had that ranking. So that’s a it’s a whole different conversation. So yeah, I really like that strategy. And yeah, I mean, that’s, that’s what it’s all about. And that’s how you get your your margins to be able to sell these leads at a pay the price that your buyers will, will spend money on them because you know, they have all these different ranges of levels so that they can make these investments at you know, so obviously, I mean, you’ve developed kind of this unique expertise and and domain names and selling leads and the legal vertical Kind of angel investing, you know, in particular, do you have a mentor that’s kind of guided you or or is it more business books related? What, who’s who’s some of your mentors or some of your favorite business books?
Braden Pollock
Um, jeez, um am, I’m reading blitzscaling right now. And I’ve been working on that for a while, mentors, they’re all over. There’s no one really specific in the industry.
That mentors it’s more kind of broad. So there’s a, there’s this attorney that I that I worked with for many years in another business who he was fascinating about him really, really bright guy. He taught me basically to dig a little deeper. He was a guy that would just uncover stuff. You know, he he wouldn’t He wouldn’t call the expert to try to hire the expert that you couldn’t hire, he would call the expert and say, Who is it that you think, you know, is really doing well in the field, right? And that like, that’s the person you can, he would just learn how to dig down an extra couple layers and taught me how to think of things a little bit differently, and how to pay more attention. And and that kind of thinking have applied to everything that I do.
Chris Dreyer
That’s incredible. So that’s like, that’s where you’re out in front on the domain names too. It’s it’s just you see these you know, I noticed that it wasn’t just comms that you own. You own the new top level domains you the TLD is the dot attorneys the dot the dot lawyers and domains like that.
Braden Pollock
But yeah, so so here’s here’s the funny thing about that is going a layer deeper. So you mentioned divorce attorney and I have I have some some names like that some attorney names that I didn’t buy them. What I did was I did a deal with a company with a with a registry before they launched. And it’s what’s called a founders program. And so they gave them to me if I was to promote the names, because I’m known in the investment industry, that domain investment community. So I built them out so that they had names that websites that they could when they launched, their websites are already built so they could showcase them. They could announce to the domain industry that I had acquired a portfolio and then I wrote that deal. I wrote my wife into it, who is a well known attorney. And so she did some commercials. They sent their crew out to the office and she did some commercials. Nice with those domains. There are, I’ve done other I’ve been in other founders programs. And sometimes so I mentioned to.org, for example, I bought a portfolio of single character.org names from the registry never been released before. So, so trying to buy stuff like this on the market, I just go straight, straight to the registry and offer them enough money and and write a business plan and, and, and make a plea and try to get them to sell me the names before they’ve been released to the public. So with.org and attorney, I use that strategy.
Chris Dreyer
Wow, that’s awesome. So, you know, you talked about kind of like your vision of seeing things and how you had this mentor where you dig a layer deeper. So what are your high value activities today? What are the actions that generate the most impact for your businesses?
Braden Pollock
Oh, god, I’m most important probably, if I stay out of the way. All of my companies have a general manager a president that I hire from within the industry. So these people oftentimes have more experience than I do so so Legal Brand Marketing, for example. I started it myself in, in my spare bedroom in my house. You know, I get up every couple hours and and forward the leads. What manually because I didn’t have a CRM at the time. But fast forward, the woman who runs that company, she’s been with me for 12 and a half years. Like, who knows more about this business? She you know, what she does every day showing up the office and dealing with the staff. For me, you know, she knows far more they don’t they don’t need me now. Right. Now, we certainly talked about the direction of the company but not not the day to day. The Director of Business Development, he’s been in the industry for 13 years. I was chasing after him for you. To come to come work for me took a long call
Chris Dreyer
because that wouldn’t happen to be Oh, Andy Northcutt. Right. Yeah, he’s definitely an A player. Yeah.
Braden Pollock
Right. So I mean, everybody knows Andy in this space. And I’ve known him since he was I think it was just out of college. It was his first job. He went to work for for a guy that I knew competitor, but I worked with them. Also, I knew Andy and all this time, he’s been in this space. And I was always trying to get him to work for me. So finally made the leap two years. Actually, I had to coax his wife into it first.
Chris Dreyer
So you, so your high value activities, you’d say, you find these a players, these integrators and they implement your vision and then kind of take over the day to day.
Braden Pollock
Yeah, yeah. And I have other companies that that I have an appointment later with, with the president of one of my companies that’s been in this industry, been in that industry for 40 years. 40. I can’t compete with that.
Chris Dreyer
I would say that’s a unique talent because most of us, most of us business owners, it’s tough to let go, and to let someone else lead, right? We, you know, it’s the E myth, you’re talking about manager, maker, technician, I haven’t read it for a bit, but it’s like that last hat to become the owner instead of the manager. And that’s where I think a lot of us struggle. So that’s, that’s a really strong skill. And it’s, it’s not common. For most, I would say, most business owners just to stay either way.
Braden Pollock
Um, you know, first of all, I could not I couldn’t do all the things that I do. If I was if, if I was trying to control everything. And also finding good people, you know, frankly, it comes down to to money, right? I mean, you just have to be willing to pay the going rate. I mean, I like to think I’m a decent guy to work for it’s Well, I mean, most most the people that work for me stay around for years. And I think it’s because I I appreciate, you know, the their skill set and and I let them make the decisions and like I said stay other way they and if they need me, right they they know how to find me they can ask me questions but otherwise I need to trust that they know what they’re doing.
Chris Dreyer
That’s awesome. That’s awesome. I love that. Braden so you know what what question you know one final question here what what questions or stories that we’ve not talked about that you feel would be important for our audience you know, primarily personal injury attorneys hustlers
Braden Pollock
for for hustlers or for
Chris Dreyer
for personal injury attorneys.
Braden Pollock
Um Yeah, I would say certainly don’t be afraid to to test people like yourself that do SEO. I mean, if you if you sit back and do nothing, you’re gonna get crushed. And, and the only way to Grow is to, to continue trying new things, whether it’s SEO on your site, or buying leads, and these aren’t mutually exclusive. Right? Right. You can’t, you certainly can’t rely on a third party to provide all of your business right that’s, that’s not a smart move. You should be building your website and you have your own brand and, and be competitive on your own. But buying leads, you’re supplementing your business like what Why? To me, it’s craziness why someone would not want to buy leads, I’ve talked to people where they say, Look, I’m reallocating this money to, you know, my own website and I want to generate leads on my own. Okay. I get that. However, you know, these leads, I’m still going to generate, they’re not going to stop being generated because you’ve reallocated her, your advertising
Chris Dreyer
by your competitors are going
Braden Pollock
to get no I’m going to now sell this to your direct competitor. So what’s that cost? Right? So, really, the answer is you need to do both. Yeah. And the thing is that with what you do that takes time, right? So somebody hires you, and it takes you many months to get that website up and competitive. Right? With leads, we turn you on and instantly you’re getting leads. We don’t have to have campaigns were built years ago, you’re going to get them immediately. Right. And, and that’s, that’s pretty meaningful, that I send you a lead five minutes after you sign up. And now you have a real live client that you are going to take their credit card from, right or Well, your case of MVA, no credit card, but you know, you have a real life client that you can sign right away, as opposed to waiting months. So the answer is do both but do something.
Chris Dreyer
Right. Absolutely. multi channel advertising, they all kind of work together to you start in that helps them build your brand equity start being known, you know, you have more money to reinvest in all your different avenues because ultimately it’s all about attention. And it’s and it’s there’s ROI built in. And that’s why you have these systems to acquire these sites that generate the leads at a price that you know that your clients can still generate ROI on. So it’s a win win.
Braden Pollock
Yeah, so every single one of your clients that while you and I don’t compete, right, because I don’t do SEO and you don’t sell leads, but you should be upselling your clients you should be providing leads to them either either buying and reselling them or referring them to someone like us, but every one of your clients should also be buying leads to supplement what they’re doing with you.
Chris Dreyer
Absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. Guys, we’ve been talking to Braden Pollock premium domain name network, angel investor, serial entrepreneur and founder of Legal Brand Marketing. Braden, where can people go to learn more about you?
Braden Pollock
I’m on the Twitter and Facebook and legalbrandmarketing.com.
Chris Dreyer
Great, and thanks so much.
Braden Pollock
My pleasure.
Conclusion
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